Handout1

Learning 53.1 - Handout #1
Dr. Delamater Historical and Philosophical Roots Lecture Outline

I. Philosophy of Mind: Gave us some interesting ideas about the nature of mind.
    a. Descartes - Mind/Body Duality; separate types of explanations for mind and body; reflex
          arc was the basic mechanism of involuntary behavior.
    b. British Associationists (Locke, Hume) - Offered a principled way to study mind
          mechanistically. Their basic system consisted of the following ideas:
        1. Empiricism - Knowledge comes from experience.
        2. Elementalism - Sensations are the basic elements from which knowledge is created.
        3. Associationism - Co-occurring sensory experiences become associated. The search for
            associative laws became one of the more important aspects of the study of mind. The
            "law"of temporal contiguity was one such idea that they proposed.

II. Russian Physiology: Gave us Experimental paradigms to study learning mechanistically.
    a. Sechenov - All behavior has stimulus antecedents; he reconceptualized the reflex in terms of a
        "trigger" mechanism; he popularized the notion of inhibition and the inhibitory reflex as a way to
        embellish a mechanistic conception of the organism.
    b. Pavlov - Embellished the mechanistic conception further by showing how initially innocuous
         stimuli can acquire significance, through the conditioned reflex. More importantly,
        1. He developed an experimental paradigm, Pavlovian conditioning, for the study of learning.
        2. The kinds of associative laws discussed by the British associationists, such as temporal
            contiguity, could be studied experimentally with this learning paradigm. For example,
            compare conditioning at different inter-stimulus-intervals (ISIs).
        3. In principle, general associative laws may be discovered with this learning paradigm.

III. Evolutionary Theory: Gave us some interesting strategies whereby learning can be studied.
    a. Mental continuity - this notion suggests that it is reasonable to look for general learning
          processes in different animal species; it also suggests that if we've truly identified a general
          learning process, that it should be observable in arbitrarily selected animal species.
    b. Species diversity - this notion suggests that differences in learning processes may also be
          observed across the animal kingdom, and the search for general principles might be limited.
          In other words, learning might be well construed as a specialized adaptation.
    c. Thorndike - Established an experimental paradigm to study the learning of voluntary behavior,
          and adapted the model of natural selection to understand instrumental conditioning.

IV. Important Issues in American Psychology in the 19th - 21st Centuries.
    a. Introspectionism vs Behaviorism - The issue concerned what was the best method for studying psychology.
         Watson and the behaviorists argued that we should stick with observables (stimuli & responses) while the
          introspectionists (like Wundt, Tichener) argued that people could be trained to report their internal states.
          The problem arose when different people reached different conclusions based on their internal states
           and there was no objective way of verifying who was right (e.g., was thought based on images or not?).
    b. Skinner's Radical Behaviorism - Behavior was the basic data of psychology. Like Watson he suggested we
          stick with observables, but unlike Watson who attempted to explain mentalistic concepts in terms of S-R
reflexes Skinner suggested that mentalistic concepts had no place for a science of psychology and were, therefore,
          unnecessary in the explanation of behavior. Behavior was best described as a function of its environment.
     c. Tolman's Operational Behaviorism - Tolman suggested that behavior could be understood in mentalistic terms
           so long as those terms could be constrained by the operations performed on the organism and the behaviors
   produced by those operations. In other words, he suggested that mentalistic concepts can be considered an
           "intervening variable" and these could legitimately have a place in a scientific explanation of behavior.
     d. Information Processing Approach - This approach took Tolman's intervening variable concept further by
           acknowledging the presence of multiple "stages" within an information processing system (e.g., sensory register,
           attentional filter, short term memory, rehearsal, long term memory, retrieval). Behavior could be profitably viewed
           within such a framework.
      e. Connectionism - More recent advances attempt to understand mind by understanding how individual neural processes
            that themselves are involved in different mental functions become "inter-connected" with one another. For example,
            the storage of a "Dog" concept occurs when different neural processes that represent different features of a dog (wags
            tail, barks, slobbers, etc) all become linked in the brain. The same circuit can be used to store the concept of a "Cat"
            except different specific neural processes that represent features characteristic of a cat (purrs, meows, etc) all become
            interconnected.